Walking round would add almost half a mile to his journey, and he was tired. He had been on duty since nine that morning, admittedly with a four-hour break in the middle of the day. All he really wanted to do was get home, get his feet up and watch a little TV before going to bed.
He decided he did not care whether he bumped into one of these citizens’ patrols. After all, they could just as easily pull him on the street as in the park. He had no more and no less to worry about by walking round.
What really bothered him was the thought that he was actually anticipating trouble. Howley had a reputation as being one of the safest towns in the country but a shocking crime like this put everyone on alert and on the day of Shana’s murder, during morning, lunch and afternoon breaks, it had been the only topic of conversation between staff and students alike. The staff, courtesy of Principal Quentin, had slightly more information than the students, but it was hush-hush. It seemed that the head of Management Studies, coincidentally the staff and student counsellor, Wesley Drake, had received some kind of message from the killer. Gary did not know Drake well, but he knew he was either married to or living with a policewoman, and scuttlebutt had it that the message was intended not for him, but her.
What did it mean? Gary had never been a student of history, modern or otherwise, but to his knowledge, most killers did not advertise their activities to the police.
As he walked along, his leather soles clicking on the main, tarmac path through the park, his thoughts turned to more convivial subjects. He knew Wes Drake slightly. A nice enough man, but one who was capable of rocking the boat, especially when Lionel Quentin hassled him. Most of the younger women at the college considered him handsome; fit… Wasn’t that the modern idiom? The whisper was that he was also unapproachable. His father was the local MP, which practically ensured that his behaviour was beyond reproach. Aside from that, why would these stupid women think he might be available when he was in a long-term relationship? And with a policewoman at that. If he wronged her, she would make him pay every time he parked on double yellow lines.
The thought brought a smile to Gary’s lips, dispelling the darker meanderings of his mind.
He was in the darkest part of the park now. Thick bushes were clumped either side of the path. When he was younger, he had spent many a time hidden in those bushes with one young woman or another. It was the perfect hiding place, not far from the town centre, a heavily populated area, but inside those thickets there was sufficient privacy for couples to get it on.
He saw and heard nothing. Something slammed into his back with the force of a hammer, and the next he knew, every nerve in his body was on fire, the volcanic agony radiating out from the point of impact. His head whirled and he slumped forward onto the path, his confused mind trying to make sense of the increasing torture. His breathing became laboured, every breath a strangled gasp, and he reached out a hand as if trying to grip the tarmac, and drag himself along.
The sound of running footsteps reached his ears, the soft pad of training shoes. He tried to form the word, ‘help’, but his vocal chords had stopped working along with so many other systems.
And then there was a knee in his back, as someone was aggravating the pain. As if they were moving something upon which he was impaled.
The balaclava came close to his ear, and the grating voice whispered to him. “I shan’t keep you waiting.”
And then it was the bite of cold steel into the right side of his neck. As he drifted into eternity, the last thing he was aware of was warm blood spurting from his ruptured carotid artery.
January 28
Chapter Eleven
The trill of the bedside phone dragged Drake reluctantly from a deep, dreamless sleep. He checked the electric blue, LED display of his alarm clock and read five-thirty. The call could not be for Becky. She had her mobile permanently switched on at her bedside, and everyone at Howley station knew to ring on that number. He doubted that Lionel Quentin was aware that half past five occurred twice in a day, and in Drake’s line of work, there was no such thing as an emergency. Logically then, the only people likely to call him at this hour were family. He reached a lazy arm to the bedside cabinet and picked up the receiver.
“Wes Drake.”
“Wes, it’s Kirsty. We’ve got another. Wharfeside Park. You’d better check your emails.”
It was as if someone had hit him with an electric cattle prod, so quickly did the news bring him to full awareness.
“I’ll ring you back.”
He leapt from the bed, disturbing Becky in the process.
“Huh? What—”
“Go back to sleep. I’ll tell you later.”
Wearing only his shorts, without bothering to dress, he rushed from the bedroom and down the stairs, to the rear corner of the living room, the area he designated his office. Flipping up the lid of his laptop, he pressed the power switch, and switched on the mains feed to the router.
It would take only a matter of seconds for the laptop to come to life, but the router would take more than two minutes. His smartphone, which could access his emails without a wi-fi connection, was in the car. He did not always leave it there, but it was one of his ways of ensuring that he took genuine time off. Despite its lengthy boot routine, the router was quicker than dressing and digging out his car keys and stepping out of the front door to retrieve the phone.
Impatient for the router to wake up, he hurried into the kitchen, switched on the kettle and prepared a cup of tea. While he waited for the kettle to boil, he bobbed backwards and forwards, checking the router’s progress. The green light had gone out, the first blue had come on. Back to the kitchen where the kettle was coming close to boil. He took a carton of milk from the fridge, and checked the router again. Flashing amber. That would go on for the better part of a minute. The kettle snapped off, and with shaking hands, he poured water into the cup, agitated the teabag, removed it, dropped it in the waste bin and stirred in a little milk in. Then he carried the beaker to the workstation, where the consistent blue power light of the router showed.
Dropping into his seat, he opened his email package. The usual assortment of spam, a couple of emails from the college, one or two from private clients, and… Yes, there it was. Right at the top of the list, delivered at just after eleven the previous night.
Slow ref Algy
Did up true carrot
Read freak whips
It was signed The Anagramist.
The familiar flood of confused and conflicting emotions washed through him, and he had to force his intellect to the fore. He never checked his emails after eight in the evening. It was another means of taking time away from the many and various hassles of his busy life. If he was not such a stickler about it, if he’d checked them before he went to bed…
It was pointless. He had not done, and there was nothing he could do about it now. His anger, his sadness, his pity for the victim and the unhinged perpetrator could come later. Right now, he had to work with the police, give them as much information as he could in an effort to track down this man.
As in the previous communication, there were only three lines, and each of them formed an anagram, but he had no way of knowing which of the words might be a vital piece of the puzzle. Fortunately, Kirsty’s phone call narrowed down the options. ‘Reads freak whip’ translated as Wharfeside Park and based on the previous message, he guessed that the first two lines constituted the victim’s identity, and the manner of his/her death. But in which order?
Nothing leapt off the screen from either line, so without evidence to back him up, he assumed that the first line was the victim’s identity, and began to work on it. A range of simple names came from the anagram: Flowers, Fowler, Gray, Grey, Lowry, even, Rose and Wroe; too many for him to make much sense of them. Logic took over, and he rang Kirsty asking whether they had identified the victim.
“Gary Fellows,” she replied. “Tutor at the college.”
More confusion assailed him. “A man
?”
“How did you guess?”
Ignoring Kirsty’s cynicism, Drake’s heart sank. He did not know Gary well, but he would easily recognise him. “How did he die?”
“Stabbed in the back and the right side of his throat sliced open. A lot of blood, and according to the Doc, there was a significant spurt. Carotid cut open. He was killed on one of the footpaths and dragged into the bushes.”
While he listened to Kirsty, the first two lines of the message rearranged themselves until the whole read: Gary Fellows, ruptured carotid in Wharfeside Park.
“In other words, it tells us nothing we don’t already know,” Kirsty said when he passed the information on.
He had not gone to bed until midnight. It was always the same when Becky was on late shift. She did not get home until half past ten, and she needed a little wind-down time before bed. Inevitably, he stayed with her, and at this hour it was a struggle to prevent sleep overtaking him.
And yet, he had no time to sleep. He made an effort to clear the fog in his head. “You’ll be calling a general briefing?”
“Yes. Early doors. Probably eight or half past.”
“I need some sleep, Kirsty. When I get up, I’ll print the message out and bring it to the station. In the meantime I’ll forward it to your email address.”
“Thanks, Wes. I’ll catch you later.”
After carrying out the promised tasks, he drank off his tea, made his way back to the kitchen, washed the cup and left it on the draining board. He unlocked the door, stepped out into the back garden.
The house’s isolated location on Moor Heights Lane meant there was a good deal of land attached to it, and the garden was over twice the size of the house. Surrounded by long, dry stone walls, it was completely lawned, with flowerbeds here and there, and a couple of trees. There were paved footpaths forming walkways, and the whole was surrounded by herbaceous borders. Neither he nor Becky were gardeners, but she liked to potter with the flowers during the summer. Drake much preferred to laze around on the grass or foldaway sun-loungers, and as a couple, they found it pleasant to take tea at a glass-topped table.
During the winter months, the back door was rarely open, and only occasionally during the colder months of the spring, but the recent, comparatively mild spell had seen it left ajar more than usual. The view over a vast expanse of moorland, grazed only by a few sheep, was peaceful and calming. It would be another two hours before the sun rose and cast its meagre warmth over the land, and right now all he could see was stars in a cloudless sky.
On the other side of the house, facing front, Howley slept on through the early hours, and hidden amongst those 47,000 people was the Anagramist. Was he sleeping peacefully? Or had he, like Drake, been disturbed. If so, was it the noise of early-morning workers going to or coming from their employment, or the euphoria of another successful attack?
Two days, two deaths, two senseless murders. He had made his statement, and if nothing else Drake was certain that Gary Fellows would not be the last victim.
Chapter Twelve
“A man has been murdered in Howley, West Yorkshire. It’s the second killing there in two weeks and although police refused to confirm it, there is speculation that both crimes were committed by the same person.”
Mealtimes were the only occasion when Sam saw any of her fellow patients. It was a deliberate choice. She wanted as little to do with them as she did the staff. Even though she shared the dining room with them, she rarely spoke to them, and when they directed a specific question at her, such as, “How are you?” her response was at best taciturn, at worst downright rude. Most of the longer term patients had learned to give her a wide berth.
Of the three meals, breakfast was marginally the best. At least the food – cereal followed by bacon and eggs, scrambled eggs, or occasionally a full English – was well-presented and palatable, unlike much of the slop served later in the day.
Meals were also the main time of the day when she caught up with the news. She had no television in her room (again by choice) and she did not take newspapers. At best, she would surf the web on one of the laptops in the day room. Even then, her attention was restricted to local bulletins, usually put out every half hour on the BBC.
The majority of items covered were trivial and she had no interest in the progress of Leeds United in the Championship, the expansion of Leeds/Bradford airport, or the political pluses and minuses of concern to the locals. But the item on the murder of Gary Fellows caught her attention immediately.
“Doctor Lionel Quentin, the principal of Howley College, also confirmed that a senior member of staff, Wesley Drake, received messages from the alleged killer. Once again, police have refused to confirm the speculation. Here’s our reporter on the spot, Vanessa James.”
As the scene cut from the studio to the reporter, stood by the grandiose, front entrance of Howley College, someone in the dining room called out, “Turn that bloody thing over. The Bill’s on channel twenty.”
Another officer, Sam had no idea of his name or rank stretched across to the windowsill to pick up the TV remote.
“Leave it.”
She snapped the order in a parade-ground bark, stunning everyone. No one could recall her saying anything to anyone in the near or more remote past. The surprise was so great, that silence fell, punctuated only by the TV reporter’s commentary.
“Gary Fellows, a maths teacher, left Howley College at about nine thirty last night, and took the bus down to Wharfeside Park, near to his home. While he was taking a shortcut through the park, he was stabbed in the back and then had his throat cut. He bled to death in bushes, just off the main pathway through the park. His body was discovered at four o’clock this morning by two police officers on routine patrol.”
What was it Drake had told her two weeks ago? Shana Kenny’s killer had sent him a message, and the media reports, perfectly tuned to the modern obsession with the grotesque and ghoulish, had been at pains to spell out the precise manner in which she died. Judging from Ms James’s report, this latest victim had died in exactly the same way.
While the reporter carried on speaking, the scene cut away to Wharfside Park and a longshot of a CSI team working amongst the shrubbery, while uniformed officers crept along on their knees, conducting a fingertip search. Sam could not help but recall the times she had been on point in such investigations – including two of her ex-husband’s murders.
The bulletin cut back to Howley College and the reporter facing the camera.
“Earlier, Lionel Quentin, principal of the college, confirmed that a senior member of staff, Wesley Drake, had received some kind of cryptic communication from the killer. Mr Drake is well known in this part of the world as the son of local MP, Edward Drake, and also for his work on television several years ago, and his bestselling volume on motivation, It’s Down To You.”
This time the picture was overlaid with a photograph of Wes Drake while Vanessa James kept on talking.
“Mr Quentin was unable to give us any further information, and both the police and Mr Drake have declined to comment. Vanessa James handing you back to the studio.”
The short bulletin was coming to a close, handing over to the weather forecast, and Sam returned to her breakfast. Any appetite she had for the scrambled eggs, which reminded her more of pale yellow Polyfilla, was gone. She pushed her plate away, got to her feet and left the dining room.
Peace Garden offered security for personal items, which were kept in large envelopes in the manager’s safe. It was designed to minimise theft, but like other conditions of residency, it was not compulsory. There were few, if any, restrictions upon the patients. If she were so minded, Sam could dress, put on a coat and go for a walk, not only around the gardens, but to the village of Shadwell. She could take a bus into Leeds if she wished. As long as the staff knew where she was. She had left her purse, car keys and mobile phone in their care. Her car was in the police pound in central Leeds. She had never set foot out of the building sin
ce her arrival, and she had no need of money or her credit cards. And while most patients kept their mobile with them, she never needed it. She did not speak to the staff, and she had no desire to speak to any of her former colleagues, her bosses, or even her family. Therefore, she had no need of the phone.
Now she had, and her first call upon leaving the dining room was to the reception counter, where she demanded the instrument and its mains charger. The request took the staff aback, but they nevertheless complied, and even though they pressed her for some kind of explanation (in the hope that she was coming out of her trauma) she said nothing, but made her way up to her room, where she put the charger in the wall socket, and hooked the phone into it.
There were few numbers in the directory. One or two old friends, her parents, her Federation representative, and a direct line to Iris Mullins’ office.
It was to this number that she made her call.
As always it was intercepted by the DCC’s private secretary, but the moment she announced herself, she was put through.
“Sam. This is a surprise. Only the other day, I was reviewing Wes Drake’s report on your initial meeting. What can I do for you?”
“Ring Drake. I want to see him.”
Chapter Thirteen
The police station was the focus of intense media attention when Drake arrived at nine-fifteen.
With unbelievable speed and enthusiasm, Radio Howley and the Reporter had already picked up on the news, and he found the front entrance awash with reporters and photographers. Across the street, the BBC News team had parked their van and the presenter was doing a piece to camera. The prurient interest, which he knew would soon turn to hysteria, sent shivers down Drake’s spine as he passed through the crowd and into the station entrance.
It did not surprise him when one or two of the local reporters called out to him. He was well-known throughout Howley, but if he was a betting man, he would put a week’s salary on the source of their initial information: Lionel Quentin.
The Anagramist Page 8
